Wonder by Dominique Fortier

same absorbed posture but this time with his temple pressed against a big stone at the back of the garden, she didn’t know what to think.
    “Edward, what are you doing there?” she asked impatiently.
    “Listening,” he replied in a low voice, as if to avoid startling a bird.
    “Listening to what?”
    “To what’s underneath.”
    She went on, determined to get to the bottom of it. “Underneath what?”
    He replied, as if it were the most normal thing in the world: “Underneath the rock.”
    She did not let go, presenting in a tone of cold observation: “Edward, what’s underneath the rock is earth.”
    Now it was the little boy’s turn to ask: “And under that?”
    “Under what?” Her impatience was growing in spite of herself.
    “Under the earth,” the child reminded her.
    She wondered how the devil her son could have become so obstinate. “Under the earth, young man, there is more earth.”
    Then, to cut short this discussion that was obviously going nowhere and from which she had no hope of emerging victorious or even of learning more about this small individual to whom she had given birth, she added sharply: “And earth is dirty. Look at yourself. Now hurry and change or you’ll be late for tea.”

    No doubt it was best, all things considered, that little Augustus Edward did not dream of becoming a disciple of Asclepius, for he was so awkward he was often a threat to himself and others. During the first ten years of his life he:
    – nearly drowned at the age of nine when he fell head first into the duck pond. It must be said that he was busy just then reading
De motu corporum in girum
by Sir Isaac Newton and that, face buried in the large volume that he was struggling to keep at eye-level, he had been advancing mechanically across the back garden, not watching where he was going. (Incidentally, he nearly drowned a second time when, after a gardener had fished him out
in extremis
, he released a desperate cry and dove back down to look for the book, which, as per the Archimedes Principle –
an object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to theweight of the fluid displaced by the object
– had sunk straight to the bottom.)
    – had four fingers run over as he was attempting to measure the circumference of a wagon wheel in motion.
    – dyed his younger sister’s hair an ugly shade of green when trying to give her the blonde tresses she’d been dreaming of, using a concoction he’d prepared from various ingredients only some of which were edible.
    – sprained his left ankle at least three times and his right ankle once on the stairs that he climbed up and down absentmindedly, chanting his sums to the sound of his steps on the marble.
    – prepared in the kitchen a mauve mixture that seethed and fumed before producing an abundant foam the dog had the misfortune to taste; the animal spent two days between life and death and afterwards stubbornly refused to place even one paw in the accursed room.
    – almost lost an eye while performing before his mother’s dressing table mirror a mysterious experiment in optics that involved a pocket handkerchief, two silver spoons, and an oil lamp; he nearly set fire to the family manor into the bargain.
    There was a time when he counted everything: the number of times he ran the comb through his crow-black hair every morning; the number of peas on his plate; the number of flagstones in the main foyer (this operationpresented an extra challenge, for those that ran along the walls had been cut and he had to reconcile the fractions); the number of footsteps between the house and the duck pond and between pond and chapel. Then he tackled some more difficult matters, endeavouring to estimate with complex formulas how many hairs there were on the dog and pieces of gravel on the paths in the garden, eventually spending weeks with his nose to the sky trying to calculate the quantity of stars in the firmament. Around the same time he